


Reigning in the Willow Babble

by orphan_account



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, buffy being bad at flying just amuses me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 03:20:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3365831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just some quick awkwardness when Willow and Tara first meet on a plane</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reigning in the Willow Babble

Willow had faced a lot of things in her life that had made her skin crawl.

From final exams to late night, 4am demon slayings, she liked to believe she had faced some of the Biggest Bads and lived to tell their tales… if only to the other Scoobies who had missed out on the catch of the day.

However, there was something about a stuffy, tiny little compartment, filled with a hundred other people in various states of unrest (not to mention _un-wash_ ) that made her yearn for fighting the bigger (not to mention, scarier) fight. Combining that with Buffy’s oddly persistent leg shaking had Willow already on edge, and the plane wasn’t even fully boarded yet. She sucked in a deep breath of deoxygenated air, already missing the fresh, warmth of the Illinois breeze.

“You didn’t have to come you know.” Willow broke the quiet between them, smiling gently when Buffy’s head rose from its place in her arms. She had lowered her table against her own better judgement to rest on in her moment of need. “I know flying isn’t your thing.”

“Nah, I got this.”

Willow felt her head fall to the side, watching her closest friend adjusting herself, her tiny body looking oddly pale for who and what she was, but Willow knew better than to bring it up again. The next few hours would give Buffy enough grief without her butting her giant head in, and she had learned that the hard way.

“You don’t have to sit up if you’re not feeling well, Buff!” Willow backtracked fast, seeing a tiny hint of green fleck along Buffy’s cheeks as soon as her eyes gravitated towards the window, the habit striking her down once again, even with the darkness that blotted out the world. Or maybe that was making it worse…  Willow wasn’t sure. “We still have time. The table thingy being down can’t crash the plane before we move right? I mean in theory it probably couldn’t anyway, since it is just a bit of horizontal plastic but… you don’t want to hear this.”

Buffy seemed to look right through her, her jaw rounding shut slowly as she chewed on the gum Willow had offered as a bribe to get her onto the giant flying machine in the first place. With minimal fuss, that is. _And to prevent those nasty ear pops,_ Willow thought to herself, secretly a little proud of how well she had thought ahead. Still, that didn’t stop Buffy from staring and she offered grin in peace. “Sorry.”

Buffy deflated. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just on edge, you know? Planes and clouds and all that jazz… I’ll be fine once we’re up there doing the bird thing.” She wouldn’t be. Willow had seen her all of five minutes during the last flight, with all her rushing to the bathroom whether just to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere or otherwise. Willow never asked. But she nodded anyway, taking the answer with a grain of salt. She had given the blonde the aisle seat that had been hers for a reason after all. Even though Buffy would never catch that subtle kindness, it made her feel a little better about dragging her out of Sunnydale to follow a false lead on a threat that wasn’t even too high on their danger list.

Willow closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, a muffled voice, bilingual though it didn’t have to be, muttering a message over speakers so poor they made her grimace. Delayed an hour. Willow sighed at the news. Buffy moaned her displeasure, and Willow patted her back good naturedly when Buffy looked ready to bolt.

“Any minute now, okay. We’ll be up there in the sky with the birdies and then we’ll be back home real fast, at real super speeds. Do you know how fast planes go? It’s like _way_ faster than cars…”

Buffy blinked her eyes open when Willow paused in her mockery of a monologue, the beat of silence lasting longer than ever, and Willow never trailed off like that without a waffled excuse. Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy peaked out through her lashes to the redhead, trying to be as sly as possible but it didn’t matter. Willow wouldn’t have noticed if she’d been playing as a one woman mariachi band right beside her, and Buffy would have rolled her eyes if her head wasn’t already pounding due to the stuffiness.

Instead, she straightened, following the direction of Willow’s dead-fish gaze to see what had caused the sudden, rarer than rare, silence of one Willow Rosenberg.

“Hey…” Buffy’s head was a little behind her lips sometimes, but she knew the awkward dance of someone too shy to lay claim to something as well as anyone. “I’m blocking your way aren’t I?”

The girl, maybe their age, Buffy would guess, started at her voice, as if she was shocked to hear her speak at all. She was dressed similarly to them, in that lazy travel-day way that had united everyone in the airport like it was some kind of uniform for a late night flight. “N-not really, you were sleeping.”

Buffy swore she could _hear_ Willow’s curiosity spike, but said nothing. “Just trying to settle a nasty digestional track actually,” she said, a little sheepish as she stood to allow entry to the dreaded window seat. “I’m Buffy, by the way. The girl who held everything up. And that’s Willow.” Gesturing to her friend, Buffy was proud to see her smiling.

“Hi…” Willow’s throat was dry. “Who’re you?”

It came out a lot rougher that it should have and almost instantly Willow wished it were possible to rewrite her own script. The stranger, her face only slightly hidden by a shimmering force field of blonde hair, died lighter near the tips, widened her eyes a little and returned to giving Willow her full attention.

“Tara.”

Willow leaned back as much as was possible to let Tara through, her heart racing. She could feel Buffy’s eyes on her, that sarcastically knowing look that made a blush rush up her chest to her cheeks and ruining her perfectly crafted, quietly confident aura. Or at least that’s the one she was shooting for.

Tara fell into the seat beside her without much more fuss, closing the blind straight away and blocking out the night while settling her bag close by her side. It was bulky, Willow noted, with sharp edges sticking out at odd angles, but she didn’t want to pry and seem weirder than usual. By then, Buffy had settled back down into her position, and as time ticked by, all fell to silence.

By the time that same monotone voice flowed through the cabin again like a contaminated stream, letting them all know that they might actually be taking off soon, it was late. Well, later than their midnight flight was scheduled to be anyway. There were some sighs of relief, one coming from directly beside Willow while Tara remained silent as ever, her eyes still scanning the aircraft as if she was searching for something no one else could see.

Willow wanted to say something while the engines whirred to life, inquire as to whether this was her first flight or if she just hated planes, like Buffy. Or if she had friends sitting somewhere else, or a lover, or family.

The more she dwelled the creepier she seemed, and Willow quickly ordered herself to shut off, focusing instead on Buffy’s death grip on the arm rest between them. _Could she break it if she tried?_ Willow smiled as the images flashed through her tired mind of the tiny blonde holding up the splintered had-been to security. Trying to explain that to the flight attendant would be tricky. Trickier than any spell ever.

_Trickier than talking to Tara?_

Willow was very much aware of her own little speech ‘impediment’ when it came to people in any way, shape or form. Whether they happened to be part of her pseudo family or an attractive stranger on a plane, Willow would be caught babbling as if it were a sport in the Olympic games and she was gunning for gold.

It wasn’t a conscious thing, or something she actively tried to stop until it was clearly making her conversational partner feel overwhelmed and even then it just left them lapsing into nothing when she finally stopped. The Scoobies (excluding Cordelia, of course) had never said a word to deter her, but she knew it was annoying. Her lips dipped at the edges while her mind wandered.

“Y-you okay?”

Willow was startled back to reality, almost jumping in her seat and found herself oddly proud when she didn’t. “What?”

Tara blushed, eyes darting from the redhead to almost everywhere she wasn’t. “It’s… there’s n-nothing in the bag you k-know. Nothing bad anyway.”

It was only in that moment that Willow registered where her resting period had left her staring blinding and, opened her mouth to reply, her eyes darted back up to meet the blonde’s in something akin to a zig zag pattern. “Oh, no, sorry I didn’t mean to stare I was just thinking about things, you know… and I get how that might have looked kinda creepy but please don’t… take it up… like that…” Willow trailed off, mainly because the smile Tara had grown over the course of her speech had derailed her train of thought so badly it had been thrown in a wildly overdramatic fashion into the imaginary sea Willow had always liked to think it ran beside, but also because she could _feel_ Buffy rolling her eyes.

Tara ducked her head the same moment Willow leaned back in her seat, sending a quick glare to her left where Buffy was trying her hardest pretending to sleep. Sucking in a quick, draining breath, she cast one more look at Tara’s bag and tried again. “So… if it’s not a bomb, what _is_ in there? It’s kinda spiky, you know?”

It was a long shot, but it seemed to work, as Tara emerged once again from her makeshift hiding place with a sheepish smile. It was a surprise on Willow’s part but she tried to hold a straight face. Tara had a really nice smile.

A nice smile always had something behind it. Willow wanted to narrow her eyes when her demon senses tingled (something Buffy had explained to her once as just being ‘fancy intuition’, but she preferred to think of as a superpower), but refrained just in time. It was best not to scare anyone away without proof like that one time in that coffee place they couldn’t go to anymore. Xander was still bitter over losing his favourite morning blend. Willow still suspected he just had a crush on that barista though.

She still thought that girl was wearing a glamour.

“I pack fast.” Tara spoke quietly, and slow enough for Willow to know she was trying her hardest not to stutter. It was cute. She was cute. Maybe a little mysterious too, and the clash of Willow’s curiosity and her caution in her tummy felt better than she expected.

Meanwhile, Buffy was starting to look visibly ill. 

Willow was kind of prepared to ignore that.

Instead, she leaned a little on the armrest separating herself and Tara in a burst of confidence. “Did you only pack books?”

Tara looked a little awkward, glancing off to the side. “Maybe.” Something in her tone made Willow feel bad. She felt the babble coming on and bit it back. Instead she reached down to her feet to grab her own bag, hoisting the sizeable green monstrosity onto her lap.

“I’m the same,” she said, rolling her eyes at the pile of four books (three of them being spell books she thought she might have needed but nope) that had collapsed when the plane took off. “Just can’t go anywhere without the trusty tomes anymore, y’know?” She patted the mess of literature with a smile she hoped looked natural enough not to show how nervous she really was, but actually made her look like she was about to projectile vomit.

Still, Tara smiled back with a little less hesitation and Willow relaxed into her seat a little. Just under two hours left in the flight, she could manage that long without babbling and ruining it right? She hoped so.


End file.
